✘ The superfan is dead. Long live community
And: Ozempicization of the economy; The craving to go viral is tiresome; Tools, not tricks; Musicians at work in the platform and AI era; Artists own the masters but rent the marketplace
In my conversations around the MUSIC x AFEM Academy: Strategic Community Building in recent weeks there is a recurring theme: “Is this for me?” The reasons vary from wondering whether they’re too junior or too senior. People have also asked if this is only for artists or only for labels. I realised that this actually reflects a bigger issue we face in music today: we don’t really understand what community actually is.
The superfan myth
I think if you read this newsletter, that you don’t really believe in the superfan myth at all. That doesn’t mean you’re not also secretly infected by it. When I speak with slightly older music industry folks, you know those who were around in the 1990s, there’s an acknowledgement: back then we could market to superfans. They were the people who bought CDs and concert tickets and merch. Three things that allowed superfans to be gathered into one useful group.
In recent years, the superfan has become a bit of a lazy trope. While everyone seems to say that they are a new revenue driver for music, the reality has shifted dramatically from a couple of decades ago. The differentiation between levels of fan is now so massive that qualifying them into a single group is next to impossible. Obsessive liking/commenting on social media doesn’t necessarily funnel into buying merch. Someone might create fan art but not have the money to buy a concert ticket. A vinyl purchase could just be because of something seen on TikTok.
So many community efforts fail, because they focus on an outdated notion of fandom. Moreover, what such a community actually wants to be is nothing more than a direct sales funnel. This completely disregards that a fan is many things.
Community is a living organism
I’m going to say it again: community is not just a group of people to sell stuff to. It’s a living organism with different angles to it, different levels of participation, and different phases of engagement. Some people are in it to create and influence the experience. Others are there to simply lurk. Both are valid and even necessary. What’s more, even the most hardcore fan goes through phases where they have less time or are indisposed. A healthy community takes all of this into consideration.
This applies whether you are building as an artist, a label, a platform, or several steps removed at, for example, the distro or CMO level. Community allows people to find ways to express their fandom within parameters set by the artist and their team, or the label owner and their team, or the product owner and their team, or the audience researcher advising many artist managers.
Why cohort-based learning
I don’t think you can learn community in isolation. This is why this Academy is cohort-based rather than, for example, self-paced. Basically, the cohort format mirrors the thing that you want to build. You get input from amazing guest practictioners: Georgia Taglietti, Kat Bassett, Yvonne Hartmann, Nina Kehagia, Gabriela Gironas, Austin Gregg, and Taz Sharp. On top of that, you get peer feedback from your fellow students who face similar issues across everyone’s own contexts.
This means if you’re an artist manager you also learn with someone building community at a label. Or, if you are building a platform you learn from someone working with indie artists. Cross-pollination like this is exactly the point of the Academy.
Your playbook
As a participant you leave the Academy with a strategic playbook geared towards your specific situation. This is a living document that can also be applied to lots of different situations. The baseline questions remain valid across contexts. An artist can use it to build community around themselves. An artist manager or label can focus on a specific artist, or take their own roster as a community. Even when you’re working for a distributor or a CMO, you still need to understand and can benefit from advising on community through this playbook.
The beauty of this playbook is that it’s yours. If you hire in a consultant, you get advice and recommendations that you still need to implement. If you read an article or a book you have a theory you still need to translate. In this Academy you build something that is directly usable for your context with guidance from people who have done it.
Who should join
Literally, anyone building community or engaging with community. Artists, managers, labels, platforms, researchers, venues, festival teams, distributors, CMOs. If you want to understand how community actually works beyond having a group of people to sell stuff to, this Academy is for you. If you recognize that the superfan model is broken and you want to build something healthier and more resilient, this is for you.
Music has great fandoms, but very few true communities. Join the Academy and let’s build together.
Don’t forget to use the discount code MUSICx20 at checkout for a 20% discount.
LINKS
💉 The Ozempicization of the economy (Kyla Scanlon)
“It also marks a shift. The internal body has a thing we can really control, with time and resources. What we have is the Ozempic optimization of everything - Ozempicization, if you will. We have a suite of magic shots now in the form of peptides and everything else that address effort and discomfort and complexity. Everything can be optimized. Everything can be controlled.”
✘ I’m just waiting to use this phrase in everyday conversation. The premise put forward by Kyla is great - control is indeed a goal, mostly espoused by tech companies. Everything is now measured in some form of output. This is also what needs to change when it comes to music finance.
🤒 ‘This craving to go viral is tiresome’: the artists sick of the pressure to promote on social media (Daniel Dylan Wray)
“The demand on independent musicians, too, is growing significantly and often superseding the main creative part of their job. The jazz and electronica artist Yarni calculated that he spent four hours a day in 2025 creating video content to promote his music. “In that time, I barely picked up an instrument,” he recently wrote.”
✘ This article spans quite a broad section of what we now call ‘creators’ and they all agree that the need to make video to promote anything is everpresent and unavoidable.
🪛 Tools, not tricks: How musicians are actually using AI (Cherie Hu, Michael Zhang, Ryan Merchant)
“Nearly nine in ten AI users report at least one concern about the technology they’re actively using. The top concerns reach far beyond usability or specific features, with issues around learning curves and interface design barely registering in our data. Instead, the friction runs deeper: in questions of authenticity (a concern for 58% of AI users), copyright (55%), and job displacement (37%).”
✘ There’s lots of good things about this report, but it captures beautifully how so many of us are now using the tools while still worrying about underlying issues.
🌱 Musicians at work in the Platform and AI era: evidence from Brazil, Chile, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and South Korea (Femke de Rijk & Robert Prey)
“At the same time, satisfaction with streaming income is low across all countries. Interviews further suggest that, across all countries, streaming’s importance lies primarily in its promotional function. This combination of high importance and low satisfaction reveals a clear paradox. Artists depend heavily on streaming platforms for visibility, promotion, audience interaction, and professional relevance, yet the financial returns from these platforms remain limited and unsatisfactory.”
✘ More excellent research here and definitely one to bookmark for when you need some real insights into how musicians are dealing with streaming. The dichotomies we all know are laid bare with data to back them up.
🐑 Artists own the masters but rent the marketplace (Daniel Dewar)
“This is where I want to be precise about what independence means and what it must mean if it is to be more than marketing copy. Independence is orientation. The artists distributed through UnitedMasters are not liberated but they are oriented toward ownership and toward the proposition that the people who make the thing should control the thing. Orientation matters because it determines what you build next.”
✘ Really lovely thought piece by Daniel on what it means to be indie nowadays and how the market structures mean it’s more a ‘state of mind’ then actually a thing that exists in the underlying infrastructure. The choice, in other words, is still there.
MUSIC
A couple of years ago my record of the year was Broken Bones by Lakou Mizik and Joseph Ray. An amazing piece of work that brought together the Haitian rhythms of Lakou Mizik with the deep house of Joseph Ray. Nyege Nyege just released Nuku by E’DU & Jugditzu. It’s a not too dissimilar combination as it combines Togolese Vodou ensemble E’DU with French producer Jugditzu. They work together on the first track which combines both approaches to rhythm and pattern-building. It’s a trip to listen to.
Kat!! I am so jealous i am not involved — this experience sounds like it’s going to be such a good time